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This week has been a lot. If you think back a million years ago (to last Friday) you’ll recall that the streets of Minneapolis were overflowing with around 50,000 peaceful protesters marching on behalf of their community and the most vulnerable among them. It was heartening. I went to bed that night thinking that we had possibly turned a corner. I knew — and know — that Trump and his private army will continue with their mission, but it felt like the people of Minneapolis were showing us a way forward.
I woke up Saturday to texts from friends in Minneapolis: He was murdered.
I had no idea what they were talking about until I opened up social media.
Then on Friday (two days ago), we woke up to news that Trump had Don Lemon and other observers and journalists arrested. By the late afternoon, more people poured into the frozen Minneapolis streets. The line of protestors was so long that a CNN reporter said he’d never seen a crowd that size in his life.
We’re all suffering emotional whiplash. The news, which has been breaking the sound barrier for the last decade, feels like it’s entering hyperspace. But there are a few specific actions taking place right now that will continue to have huge impacts on our culture, our society, and on American Democracy for generations. These actions are being undertaken by a small handful of men, quietly, in a way that feels almost like background noise. But what these men are doing could ultimately calcify the autocratic reign of … whoever wants to be the autocrat next.
And it starts with your phone.
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A New Type of Oligarchy
This is an imperfect analogy.
Before capitalism, humans operated, for the most part, under feudalism. Basically, this was a land-for-loyalty arrangement. A lord owned land and granted portions to vassals in exchange for military service and labor. Serfs worked the land but were bound to it — they couldn't leave, and much of what they produced went to the lord. Wealth meant land, not money. Markets existed but were marginal to how most people survived.
The wealthy land owners spent their money buying rugs and decorating their castles.
Things happened. The Black Death. Peasants' Revolt. The Medici figured out how to use their money to make more money. The enclosure movement saw common lands that peasants had used collectively privatized — enclosed by wealthy landowners for sheep grazing. Wool had become so profitable that you might think of it like we think of oil today. So the rich wanted to own the sheep that the peasants used to tend to.
Over five centuries or so, in starts and stops, with a million detours, capitalism became the chief organizing principle of economies and societies. Capitalism is about contract and exchange — formally free individuals sell their labor or goods in markets, and wealth accumulates through investment and profit rather than hereditary land ownership.
Some formerly wealthy families figured out how to use their wealth to become even wealthier (and some didn’t). Some former serfs figured out how to turn their labor into a little capital, and that little capital into big capital. Some got rich. Some got poor. Most of us sit in the middle somewhere.
If that’s a clunky, overly easy way of describing the tectonic shift between these two economic systems, I apologize. But let’s fast forward. ...
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